chapter 5 History and Seismology in the Ring of Fire Punctuating the Indonesian Past Anthony Reid Terrifying spasms of the planet like the one that struck northern Honshu in March 2011, or Aceh and much of the Indian Ocean littoral on Boxing Day 2004, force us to reflect on what our discipline is about. The longer the time-depth considered, the more human history can be seen to be dependent on the benef- icence of the planet we inhabit. In our preoccupation with the rise, fall, suc- cesses and follies of states, especially of our own states, historians have often missed the larger vocation of seeking to understand the planet itself. Here Peter Boomgaard blazed a crucial trail, showing what appropriately equipped histori- ans can do to write the history of the Southeast Asian environment as a crucial part of that of the planet.1 Yet this too risks becoming a marginal sub-discipline. The great majority of historians of Southeast Asia focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have little contact with those we call pre-historians, let alone seismologists, geologists, life scientists and climatologists. Past Neglect Since 2004 Sumatra has come to be understood as one of the most active and dangerous tectonic subduction zones in the world, with the most dramatically evident periodicity of mega-events (Perkins 2008). But the historians and oth- ers who wrote about Sumatra in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did little to prepare their readers for violent earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and climatic aberrations. Authors such as C. Snouck Hurgronje, E.S. de Klerck, E.B. Kielstra, John Bastin, Denys Lombard, James Gould, Mohammad Said, Ibrahim Alfian, Christine Dobbin, J. Kathirithamby-Wells, Freek Colombijn and myself virtually ignored natural events, though we have done a little better since 2004.2 1 Firstly by leading the kitlv project on Ecology, Demography and Economy in Nusantara (eden) for 15 years, and finally in his path-breaking Southeast Asia: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: abc Clio, 2007). 2 To be fair, Freek Colombijn (1994:43) had one sentence noting that Padang was virtually destroyed by the 1797 earthquake. Since 2004 we have all done better, including Colombijn in © anthony reid, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004288058_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. Anthony Reid - 9789004288058 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:47:07PM via free access <UN> History And Seismology In The Ring Of Fire 63 The disasters which have succeeded one another between the Aceh- Nias tsunami of December 2004 and the South Pagai (Mentawai) tsunami of October 2010 (Table 5.1) appeared unprecedentedly ferocious to Indonesians living today, but were ‘business as usual for the earth’ (McCaffrey 2009:363). We now know that such ruptures in the earth’s crust occur with necessary reg- ularity, and that the bigger events every few centuries have enormous impacts not only on Indonesia but on the planet as a whole. Our politically-focussed histories look woefully inadequate to explain this pattern. The regularity of disasters on the subduction zones was reported first for California and Japan, while Sumatra was little noticed even by geologists until a seminal article by geophysicists Newcomb and McCann (1987) assem- bled the evidence pointing to its dangers in 1987. The scientists use the data of historians when they can, though in Southeast Asia we have not been par- ticularly helpful to them. A comprehensive record began to be available for the whole planet only once the seismograph was invented around 1900, and long after that descriptions of the effects of seismic movements on human Table 5.1 Major seismic disasters in Indonesia since 20043 Date Magnitude Place Direct Fatalities 2004, 26-12 9.2 M + tsunami Aceh-Nias 167,800 2005, 28-3 8.6 M + tsunami Nias 1,313 2006, 26-5 6.3 M Yogyakarta 5,749 2006, 17-7 7.6 M + tsunami Pangandaran, W. Java 802 2007, 12-9 8.4 M Mentawai, Padang, 25+ 2009, 30-9 7.6 M Padang 1,117 2010, 25-10 7.7 M + tsunami Mentawai 400 2010, 26-10 V4 eruption Merapi, Java 324 2012, 11-4 8.6 earthquake Aceh 5 2013, 15-9 V2 eruption Sinabung, N. Sumatra 17 2014, 13-2 V2 eruption Kelut, E. Java 7 several articles, and Jeffrey Hadler (2008: ch. 6). My edited Verandah of Violence: the Background to the Aceh Problem (Singapore University Press: 2006) was named partly in rec- ognition of Aceh’s exposure to tectonic violence. 3 Earthquakes are rated by magnitude (M), volcanic eruptions by Volcanic Explosivity Index (V) on a scale from 1 to a maximum 7, following the Smithsonian Institute Global Volcanism Program. Anthony Reid - 9789004288058 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:47:07PM via free access <UN> 64 Reid societies remained underreported in Indonesia. Before 1900 our understand- ing is dependent firstly on the written records of observers, and increasingly on scientific investigation of the traces left by volcanic eruptions, earth- quakes and tsunamis on the ground. The ring of fire around the Pacific where the periodic pattern should be clearest is for the most part deficient in his- torical records before 1600, perhaps in part because of the pattern of periodic disasters. Only Japan has records back into the first millennium ce. These have preserved a pattern of earthquakes with attendant tsunamis in the Nankai subduction zone off Shikoku and southern Honshu as far back as 684, with the biggest ones in 1293 (Kamakura – over 20,000 estimated killed), 1703 (Genroku, over 100,000 perhaps killed, est. 8.0 M), in 1605 (est. 7.9 M), 1707 (8.4 M), 1854 (8.6 M) and 1946 (8.4 M). Another huge one is therefore antici- pated in that region anytime, although it was not anticipated further north in Tohuku. Our lack of knowledge of Indonesia’s tectonic past, in contrast not only with Japan but with other less populated or exposed places around the ring of fire, is strikingly borne out in the most influential data sets now avail- able to the scholarly community. The us National Geophysical Data Center records only 26 tsunamis known in Indonesia before 1800, of which 20 were in the areas of immediate concern to the lucrative voc spice monopoly in Maluku in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Four large ones were reported at the European pepper-posts of Padang and Bengkulu in Sumatra, but none in Java where the endangered south coast was then of no interest to the Dutch. By contrast 29 have been recorded in the 22 years since 1990, including 9 massive ones killing over 100 people, two of them in Java.4 Similarly for volcanic eruptions, the Smithsonian Institute list shows that since 1982 there have been 25 eruptions in the world of a scale to cause great damage (4 or more on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or vei, a scale extend- ing to 7), of which 10, or 40%, have been in Southeast Asia or Papua New Guinea, 5 of them (20%) in Indonesia. Most of the others have been in underpopulated areas of the ring of fire such as Alaska or Kamchatka. The further we go back in time, however, the less well represented Indonesia is in the record, with 16% in the nineteenth century, 3% (just one recorded) in the eighteenth, 12.5% in the seventeenth, 9.5% in the sixteenth, and nothing at all in the acknowledged record before that except a suspect memory of an eruption of Krakatau in 416 ad. By contrast hundreds of eruptions over the last few thousand years have been scientifically dated elsewhere, notably in 4 noaa National Geophysical Data Center, register of tsunami events, http://www.ngdc.noaa .gov/hazard/hazards.shtml, accessed 6 July, 2011. Anthony Reid - 9789004288058 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:47:07PM via free access <UN> History And Seismology In The Ring Of Fire 65 northern sections of the Pacific Ring of Fire and in New Zealand. Almost everything remains to be done in Indonesia.5 Why has there not been more attention to the earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that punctuate Indonesia’s history? Indonesia’s rel- ative poverty and weak scientific infrastructure is of course the major rea- son. But in addition, the twentieth century in which adequate reporting really began appears to have been exceptionally quiet seismologically, while it was full of violence and upheaval politically. In the nineteenth century Indonesia’s massive volcanic eruptions, Tambora (1815, vei 7) and Krakatau (1883, vei 6), darkened and cooled the whole planet and produced years without summer in Europe, though this causation has only recently been understood (Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders 2002: ch.6, ch.7). In the twentieth there were the usual frequent eruptions, including eight which have subsequently been ranked as vei 4 for their destructive capacity. Only Gunung Agung’s 1963 eruption in Bali was rated a 5 and killed some 2000 people. Even more remarkably, no mega-ruptures were recorded on the subduction zones of Sumatra or Java causing earthquakes in excess of mag- nitude 8 between the 1861 one in Southwest Sumatra (later reconstructed as 8.5 M) and the massive quake (9.2 M) and tsunami of 2004. Further east, earthquakes of 8.5 and 8 M were reported in Maluku in 1938 and 1939, an 8 in Sumba and Sumbawa in 1977, and an 8.2 in Papua in 1996, but these were in remote and less populous areas that made little impact on urban Indonesians.